A Weblog by One Humble Bookman on Topics of Interest to Discerning Readers, Including (Though Not Limited To) Science Fiction, Books, Random Thoughts, Fanciful Family Anecdotes, Publishing, Science Fiction, The Mating Habits of Extinct Waterfowl, The Secret Arts of Marketing, Other Books, Various Attempts at Humor, The Wonders of New Jersey, the Tedious Minutiae of a Boring Life, Science Fiction, No Accounting (For Taste), And Other Weighty Matters.

Who Is This Hornswoggler?

Andrew Wheeler has worked in book publishing for 25 years. He spent 16 years as a bookclub editor (for the SFBC and others), and then moved into marketing. He marketed books and other products for Wiley for eight years, and now works for Thomson Reuters. He was a judge for the 2005 World Fantasy Awards and the 2008 Eisner Awards. He also reviewed a book a day for a year twice. He lives with The Wife and two mostly tame sons (Thing One, born 1998; and Thing Two, born 2000) at an unspecified location in suburban New Jersey. He has been known to drive a minivan, and nearly all of his writings are best read in a tone of bemused sarcasm. Antick Musings’s manifesto is here. All opinions expressed here are entirely and purely those of Andrew Wheeler, and no one else.

Friday, October 29, 2010

This is not the whole story. Much like Charles Burns's last work, the great graphic horror novel Black Hole, was serialized in comics form over a decade before being collected into a single large book, whatever book X'ed Out will eventually become part of is not completed, and won't be for several years. What we have here is the first section: fifty-two pages of comics about one boy and his two worlds. So don't go into it expecting an ending.

X'ed out isn't a single story, either: at the center of it is Doug, a teen from about thirty years ago [1], living in both the real world and in another one: dream, fantasy, or dying reverie...or perhaps something else. On some pages -- such as the first sequence, when he wakes up in his basement bedroom and follows his thought-dead cat through a hole in the wall into a strange dusty town -- Doug looks cartoony, with Tintin-esque dot eyes. At other times, which seem to be flashbacks, or perhaps just glimpses of his current, "real" life, Burns draws Doug in his more usual, realistic style.

Doug's journey through the strange world is symbolic, perhaps -- that world, which is brighter and sharper than our own, has details that send the narrative back to Doug's teenage life, to his pills and the girlfriend who doesn't appreciate how tormented he is (and to the artsy girl who will become his girlfriend, and who, we think, does appreciate how tormented he is), to his unhappy parents and that dingy basement room where he sleeps. Doug is passive in the stranger world, and only a bit more active in the real one; even by the end of X'ed Out, he's as confused as we are, reading his story.

The two worlds have some deep connection -- as I said, it could be a dream, or an afterlife, or a drug-induced vision, or several other things, and we don't know which yet -- which will be revealed eventually. Perhaps the next book -- which the last page of X'ed Out teases as "The Hive" -- will explain what has happened to Doug, and how these two stories are connected. For now, though, we have fifty pages of brand-new Charles Burns comics: bright, sparking, and cutting, like the pieces of a broken mirror. There hasn't been a new major Burns story in a decade, so it's best just to sit back and let this one wash over you -- it will all become clear eventually, in time.

[1] He has an unironic punk hairdo and a cassette recorder with corded microphone, and a box of Pop-Tarts comes with a 7-cent coupon. From this, and other data, I deduce a milieu of late '70s or early '80s.Book-A-Day 2010: The Epic Index